Archive for October, 2011

Dan Calabrese

Michigan’s no-fault auto insurance system is very unpopular. With the insurance industry, that is. Whereas they can sell policies of defined, limited benefit amounts in other states, they are required by law in Michigan to sell everyone policies that cover unlimited lifetime medical benefits in the event they suffer catastrophic injuries in an auto accident.

The system – or at least one aspect of it – is unpopular with another group of people, and that is a certain subset of accident victims. They don’t like it because, when insurance companies try to deny claims for various and sundry reasons, the accident victims’ only recourse by law is to go to court. The insured and the insurers spend way too much time in Michigan courts fighting over benefits, because an insurance policy is a private contract, and the only way to enforce the terms of a contract is civil action.

So if you’ve got a massive head injury and can’t work, but the insurance company’s doctor says you’re just fine and don’t need any more treatment, you need to hire your own attorney and take on the insurance company lawyers.

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Jocelyn Benson

The Michigan and United States Constitutions provide the bedrock of our democracy.  They establish the standards, the protections and the promises that government cannot abridge.  They establish a right to free speech, to worship and to vote, along with other protections.  And the Michigan Constitution grants citizens the right to hold our state officials accountable, by giving them the authority to overturn bad laws.

“The people reserve to themselves the power to propose laws and to enact and reject laws,” says the Michigan Constitution, including “the power to approve or reject laws enacted by the legislature.”

This means that, under our state constitution, if enough citizens disagree with legislation that the state enacts, they can vote to get rid of it.

But crafty lawmakers in Lansing have figured out a way to override this overriding authority.  Because courts have ruled that if legislation they enact in some way grants funding – an “appropriation” – the further its purpose, then that new law is immune to potential repeal from the voters.

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Herman Cain

My continued strong performance in the presidential polls has the media, pundits and political strategists confounded, because I am not running my campaign in the way they say I am supposed to.

Newsflash: I’m not going to start now.

Having said that, I think it’s worth considering how the media and the talking heads assess candidates for the highest office in the land, and the criteria they use for deciding who is a serious candidate and who is supposed to be perceived as some sort of fringe figure.

Although I am leading in the national polls and have practically run the table on the recent straw polls, the pundits and the political consultants say I don’t have a chance because I’m not doing it their way. They don’t like the fact that I’m spending time in states like Tennessee, Arkansas and Alabama instead of living in Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s just not done! They are beside themselves because I supposedly don’t have a large enough staff. (They actually have no idea what the size of my staff is, but that doesn’t stop them from talking about it.)

And the way they flyspeck my campaign ads, you’d think they were advertising consultants critiquing a bunch of Super Bowl commercials. Just about every professional political consultant in America had a conniption fit over my recent ad featuring my chief of staff, Mark Block. (You know . . . the “smoking man” ad.) That ad has now had more than one million views on YouTube, and that doesn’t even include those who saw it on The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity. And since it began circulating, I’ve risen in the polls. My name ID has risen from 21 percent in August to 79 percent now.

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Jake Davison

Last November’s elections were a massive landslide that most voters assumed would put the brakes on President Obama’s big government agenda. But the Obama Administration has stretched the executive branch’s power beyond anything the founding fathers intended in order to keep pulling the country’s domestic policies ever leftward. Obama and his army of radical regulators are largely succeeding in ignoring Congress, skipping the democratic process and re-writing laws under the guise of mere regulation.

You may remember from high school civics class that the legislative branch writes the laws, the executive branch enforces them and the judicial branch interprets them. But President Obama, a graduate of Ivy League Columbia University and Harvard Law School, as well as being a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, is apparently too well educated to let that passé, crusty Constitution get in his way. In his first two years, he and his party-controlled Congress passed a bushel full of massive regulations, including ObamaCare. Now that a Republican is Speaker of the House, he has barely slowed down.

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Dan Calabrese

I feel like I have to explain this a lot, but maybe there’s some value to explaining it a lot: Rick Snyder is not a political conservative, nor is he a moderate, nor he is a liberal. Those of you who insist on finding an ideological label for everyone get head-explosion syndrome trying to figure Snyder out.

The governor’s only ideology is achievement. That’s what you get when you elect a CEO as governor. And that’s why the infrastructure proposals he unveiled on Wednesday should not surprise anyone. They perfectly fit the pattern for how Snyder has governed thus far.

The problem Snyder sees: There is not a reliably sufficient pot of money to maintain roads, build new infrastructure where necessary and invest in mass transit. The solution to Snyder is natural. Create one. By hiking vehicle registration fees and shifting from a per-gallon gas tax to a tax on wholesale fuel prices, he gets the money and fixes the roads. And by pushing some implementation of the registration fees to counties, and requiring voter approval, he essentially gives voters a choice between saving a few bucks or forever testing their shock absorbers as they bounce atop potholes.

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Robert Laurie

We need more mass transit.  We need more taxes designed to generate cash, which would be used to repair aging roads and infrastructure.  We need more fees on new car purchases.

These are not the newest Obama-sponsored talking points, though you’d be forgiven for assuming they were.  After all, the ‘taxes + mass transit = enlightened, successful, government’ canard has been a staple of the left for the past 40 years.  Now, however, it’s a new centerpiece of Governor Snyder’s vision for Michigan, and if you think it sounds strange coming from a Republican, you’re not alone.

Snyder’s proposals would see a system of high-speed buses running from the downtown area, out Woodward to Birmingham, out Michigan Avenue to western Wayne County and to Metro Airport on their way to Ann Arbor.  A second system would serve the eastern suburbs, connecting Detroit to Mt. Clemens.

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David Karki

Two months still remain in 2011, but the year’s theme has already been inexorably set. From the “Arab spring” to Wisconsin public employee unions, to flash mobs looting stores to the Occupy [Insert Location Here] radicals, to lifeless losers nearly rioting outside the Casey Anthony trial acquittal, and even Libyan extremists nearly carving up Moammar Gadhafi alive before brutally murdering him, there can be no question that this is the year that the angry mob came to the forefront.

And it’s a trend that has shown no sign of abating, which does not bode well for the endurance of civilization and the rule of law.

The common trend running through all these situations is the quick, instinctive turning to force – if not violence – when the system, whatever it may have entailed, didn’t deliver the result a particular group of people desired or demanded. It is the adult equivalent of a toddler’s temper tantrum, thrown in the hopes of manipulating mom and dad into abandoning the rules they previously laid down in order to keep the peace. Except that in this case, whoever is in the role of “parent” doesn’t necessarily have the power to either disregard or stop the tantrum and could well wind up hurt or dead at the hands of the raging child.

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Brett Noel

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James Melton

U.S. Rep. Hansen Clarke has a crazy plan to save Michigan’s largest city. Or, I should say, he has a plan that seems that way until one realizes every non-crazy idea for saving Detroit has been either tried already, or dismissed as politically impossible.

To some people, Clarke’s plan still might seem to be a little bit “out there,” even considering all that. But, crazy or not, Clarke’s bold proposal is getting some serious traction and picking up support from both sides of the aisle.

The centerpiece of Clarke’s proposal is something he calls a Detroit Jobs Trust Fund. Before you start thinking “federal bailout,” or “massive hand-out,” you should know that, while the fund would consist of real money, none of it would be yours – that is unless you live or operate a business in Detroit. And even if you do, it would not raise your taxes one penny.

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Eric Baerren

If you pay attention to the issue of how local libraries are funded – a story only slightly less interesting than the relative merits of salt versus crushed corncobs to aid motorists post-snowstorm – you’ve probably seen a line item in the budget that comes from tickets issued by local law enforcement.

The connection between speeding tickets and the local library is that there isn’t one. The idea, sent down to us from men much wiser than today’s crop of leaders, was that if you allow law enforcement to use money from tickets that its officers issued, you provide the police with a financial incentive to write a lot of unnecessary tickets. To prevent that, the money is turned over to the local library.

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